


if this is a romcom, kill the director

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Post-Game, Simulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 18:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15200378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: After the game is over, three participants think back on who they were and what they have done.





	if this is a romcom, kill the director

It isn’t that Kaito doesn’t love her any more. It’s that she isn’t _her_ any more; sure, she must look the same, and have the same harsh fragility in her stride, but she’s not his - he didn’t get to know this woman, never gave her a dumb nickname, never laid down his life for…

No. He can learn to love her again, because if he came out of the simulation with distinct personality changes, arguably for the better, then perhaps she did, too. It’s not like he knows a single thing; Team Danganronpa have been vigilant in keeping everyone apart, so he’s seen nothing besides the four walls of his room, and nobody besides the nurses who check on him daily.

Besides that, he’s essentially free to do as he pleases. There’s a television in his room, playing what they call _highlights_ from Season 53, although he’d much rather pretend like the whole damn thing never happened, even if it was technically all in their minds. Hearing their names on screen makes him sick - it’s something he didn’t anticipate having a hard time working through, but he can’t bring himself to even think the names of his former friends.

And, more than that, he hates the fact that he’s stuck between two realities. The Kaito Momota - Ultimate Astronaut in his mind screams at him to be bolder and braver than this, to break free of his room and find her once more, because there’ll always be a foreign space in his heart reserved for her. But the reality of who he truly is weighs down on him, and all he can do is watch and rewatch his application video and pray that he either never becomes that person again, or at least that when he reverts back to being a psychopathic man with a lust for murder, he won’t have any emotions left to feel guilt. The choice between which person he _wants_ to be is easy - he can still feel the light brush of his jacket against his shoulder, a haze of purples and stars. But choosing is something entirely different to _becoming._

In his frustration, he punches the wall. Surely Team Danganronpa will have anticipated this, because the wall doesn’t break and instead maintains its sturdiness; the only evidence of Kaito’s human emotion comes in a faint red-on-white blur, and a gash on his knuckle.

Can you change who you are?

* * *

 

Maki won’t speak a single word to anyone. She won’t even nod or shake her head when the nurses ask her how she is; she knows they don’t really care. Every cell in her body burns with the heat of a million supernovae in anger at what exactly was done to her - she doesn’t give a shit if she signed her life away to Team Danganronpa, it shouldn’t have even been an option in the first place. She remembers, now that she’s out of the simulation, how well everything was marketed, how _‘safety is our first guarantee’_ and _‘only legal and consenting adults can apply’,_ but they were just the surface-level lies. Shuichi had exposed to the audience just exactly what they were watching; he had wormed his way under their desensitised flesh and said, _“Look at us, dying. Look at us, dead. Our corpses presented for you. Are you okay with this?”_

Still, she’s cynical. She doubts that anything will have changed on the outside. With the expertise of the Danganronpa PR Team, she’s almost sure that they’ll have covered everything up and tied it into a neat little bow, ready for Season 54. She’s _almost_ sure. Because she can’t be fully sure of anything any more. Least of all whether she can be true to her feelings from the game.

Whenever she thinks of him - _him,_ because his name tastes like acid on her tongue, familiar and burning - she can’t quite wrap her head around what he was supposed to be. Sure, Team Danganronpa must have wanted him to play the goofy, optimistic, well-meaning sidekick, with a little extra kick of unconventional intelligence to fall back on. But there was something…other about him in the game, like a remnant of the despairing man who applied for the show. Thinking back on when Kaito punched Shuichi, when he got angry at the uselessness of everything - that was really just a part of his personality before the game, seeping through the supposedly seamless cracks of a prized Danganronpa creation. Maki wonders who he is now, and what runs through his mind as he struggles to come to terms with everything.

And more than that, she’s a survivor; he’s not. She doesn’t know exactly what he went through - she got close to dying when the Ultimate Academy fell, but he actually lived, _or died_ , through his implanted illness and being shot into orbit. When she remembers his face, a pained smile cracking through the façade of his kind, soft features, she thinks how horrifying it was to see him be forced into that rocket and watch the agony of burning up on his face. He died, and then came back as someone else.

Can you love someone you never really knew?

* * *

 

Tsumugi sits at her desk, her head in her hands. Since she knew all along, in the simulation, the true nature of Danganronpa and that nothing she witnessed was real, she didn’t need rehabilitation as much as the others. Just a quick medical check and psychiatric evaluation - which she, as suited to her nature, lied her way through - and then she was free to go.

_Free_ to go back to her desk job, having had her glory as mastermind; she wishes even now that the game was more than just a simulation, because dying under that rock in the heat-death of fame would have been so much better than becoming a nobody again. Danganronpa won’t reuse masterminds, and she knows that there’s no place for her now. It’s only a matter of time before she’ll be coerced into handing in her notice.

Would she change it? Perhaps, but she still thinks that her crowning moment was the game that _she_ created; all those relationships, all those plot twists, all that heartache and character development - it was all her, and she won’t let anybody take that achievement away. So, given her time again, she would most likely end up falling into the same, plain old steps of the woman she was.

In desperation, she had begged the PR team to plaster her name wherever they could; a signal to the public that the tears they shed over Kaede’s death, the injustice they felt over Kirumi’s execution, their rage at Korekiyo, their heartache for Gonta, the tragedy for Kaito and his lost love - those emotions belong, forever, to Tsumugi Shirogane. And yes, she does favour the killers, not out of any twisted sentimentality for the false-friendships she formed with people who tried to betray her, but merely because their storylines took longer to write. Of course, there was some freedom of choice in the game for people to act out of their own will, but she was so clever, so, so clever, and she utilised every single motive and flashback light to direct her participants to the carefully crafted end.

Can you have glory twice?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment if you liked this!
> 
> Title from 'Kill the Director' by The Wombats.


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